Therese of Lisieux: Spiritual guide

This image helps me look forward with excitement to the Divine Bridegroom's coming for me and invites me to prepare now for that day. I find in Therese's awareness of her oncoming death many lessons that help me to live in this period of waiting for the Lord's coming-lessons of trust, confidence, joyous expectancy, and longing for Jesus. "I am not dying," she reminds us in her letter to I'abbe Belli6re just four months before she left this world, "I am entering into Life."30

Therese can also guide us toward the moment of death in another important way. As much as we may in faith anticipate our death as a day of joy when the Bridegroom comes to take us to our new home, we may also experience this period of preparation as a time of excruciating chaos, occasioned by our declining health, the unexpected anarchy of feelings reviving long-forgotten memories of dread and guilt, or any number of painful human conditions associated with the dying process. In these moments, too, Therese can be a trustworthy guide because she went through horrendous physical pain and interior trials before her death, causing her to doubt the very existence of the heaven she longed for and to live in a "night of nothingness."

From the experience of her last months on earth, Therese guides us toward our own death by helping us realize that, while we long for the presence of the Bridegroom, there also remains much within us that needs to be purified and transformed before we are totally prepared for union with the Beloved. Therese teaches us both to long enthusiastically for the Lords coming but also to be prepared for and fully open to the special, final purification God intends for each of us.

Conclusion

All of us, wherever we are in our journey through this world, can find reliable spiritual guidance from St. ThAr-se of Lisieux. She helps those in their younger years to live and work with confidence and trust in God's love for them. She assists us older ones in the sometimes joyous and sometimes painful surrender of our entire being into the hands of our all-merciful God. For all of us, her poetic words are filled with realism and consolation:

When the blue sky turns black

and he seems to abandon me,

my joy is to stay in the dark,

to hide and keep down.

Jesus my only love,

his holy will is my joy,

therefore fearless I live,

I like night time as much as the day.

And I redouble my love

When He hides from my faith.

What are life or death to me?

Jesus, my joy is to love you! 31

NOTES

1. This article was first given as a talk at the Eastern Regional Congress of the Secular Order of Discalced Carmelites, June 12-15, 1997, Melville, Long Island, NY. In addition to Therese's own writings, I have drawn heavily upon the following sources for details about Therese's life and her work as a spiritual guide: Guy Gaucher, The Story ofa Life: St. Therese of Lisieux, trans. Anne Marie Brennan (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987); P. Louis Gillet, "St. Therese of the Child Jesus and Spiritual Direction," trans. J. Clarke, O.C.D., in Carmelite Studies I.- Spiritual Direction, ed. John Sullivan, O.C.D. (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1980), pp. 81-100. 1 am especially grateful to my Carmelite brothers, Ed O'Donnell, O.C.D., and Matthias Montgomery, O.C.D., for helping me prepare this talk for publication.